Page:The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1927).djvu/56

6 regarded as in any wise in disagreement with canonical, or exoteric, Buddhism, but as being related to it as higher mathematics are to lower mathematics, or as being the apex of the pyramid of the whole of Buddhism.

In short, the evidence adducible gives much substantial support to the claim of the lāmas, to whom we refer, that there is—as the Bardo Thödol appears to suggest—an unrecorded body of orally transmitted Buddhistic teachings complementary to canonical Buddhism.

Turning now to our text itself, we find that structurally it is founded upon the symbolical number Forty-nine, the square of the sacred number Seven; for, according to occult teachings common to Northern Buddhism and to that Higher Hinduism which the Hindu-born Bodhisattva Who became the Buddha Gautama, the Reformer of the Lower Hinduism and the Codifier of the Secret Lore, never repudiated, there are seven worlds or seven degrees of Māyā within the Sangsāra, constituted as seven globes of a planetary chain. On each globe there are seven rounds of evolution, making the forty-nine (seven times seven) stations of active existence. As in the